Day after Doomsday
by Romantic Twist
Summary: An alternate version of the episode Doomsday, which leads to a crossover with the parallel version of a one-off character from Sliders.


(An alternate ending of the Land of the Giants episode "Doomsday," with a Sliders crossover)

Spoiler Warning: Don't read these chapter notes if you don't want a preci of the TV serieses Land of the Giants and Sliders.

Prologue: Consider the Timeline for the events about to unfold. In 1983, the crew and passengers of sub-orbital flight 612 in Spindrift passed through a space warp and landed on a world of giants. It was not earth, but another planet known only to the earthlings as the Land of the Giants.

In 1995 Quinn Mallory, Professor Maximillian Arturo, Wade Wells and Rembrandt Brown began randomly 'sliding' through portals from one parallel earth to another. In 1996, they visited many earths, including one where time was behind, so that the ages of people and corresponding events of 1984 were occurring in 1996. They also visited an earth where everything was giant sized, including the people. Quinn didn't stay long enough on that world to find out that its time condition was the reverse on that earth. The events of 2008 were occurring on the giant earth. The giants were 12 years older than the normal sized doubles they had on other earths. This meant, with a 12 year discrepancy, that the events of most earths' 1996s were occurring on the giant earth back in 1984 (around the same time that the Spindrift crew were on the alien world known as the Land of the Giants).

On another earth in 1996, Quinn Mallory had met Logan St Clair, a woman who matched his intellect and rivalled his research in Sliding technology. He learned that Logan was a female counterpart of himself.

What Quinn didn't know was that an adult giant Logan St Clair had existed on the giant earth in 1984. She had not only built a portable sliding 'timer', but had also designed a viewer to scan other earths. She had learned that all of them were inhabited by much smaller doppelgangers. She had decided that she could not risk sliding, falling out of a portal into one of their cities and crushing people. She modified the geographical ranges of her scanner and her timer to look to other planets. That is when she looked into events occurring in late 1984 in the Land of the Giants…

September 11th, 1984…

As we have already seen on TV (up to the point where this story is rewritten), Fitzhugh, Betty, Dan and Steve came across a dying man, snuck into his house and saw him visited by a woman and left for dead. She was called Dr North. Fitzhugh had accidentally sneezed, while the earthlings (known as 'little people' to the giants) were hiding in a hole in the wall. Now see a different version of events unfolding, quite unlike what occurred in the rest of the TV episode.

Dr North smiled , knelt down and reached into the hole. Although giant sized, her slender female hands were able to clutch hold of Fitzhugh and pull him out.

"You're too cute to leave here," she said, "I'm leaving on a plane in the morning, but you can ride in my pocket."

Dr North drove him to the airport in her car, and told him how she planned to blow up the city with loads of bombs, which had already been planted, as her people had a totalitarian government that suppressed people and ignored individual rights. As well as that, even the civilian giants were known to have terrorized Little People or captured them for rewards. She used all these arguments to appeal to Fitzhugh for approval of her plot. The sun had risen.

Alexander Fitzhugh had never really conquered the selfish urges, which had defined his life. Mark Wilson, Valerie Scott and the others had all adapted quickly to become supportive members of the Spindrift group, when they had understood their situation of being trapped in a giant land and working together to escape it. Fitzhugh had exhibited occasional moments of selfless behaviour, particularly where Barry Lockeridge was concerned, but hadn't acquired the same moral strengths which had begun to work their way into Mark and Valerie.

So at this point, it escaped Fitzhugh's mind, that some benevolent giants had helped them. Yet he still knew that he had to warn his earthling friends. He did find Dr North attractive, and in fact a woman after his own heart who defied the S.I.D. for her own ends. He hoped she would not hear him doing what he did next. She had just hidden him in her handbag, while waiting for the plane to receive passengers. Fitzhugh quietly used his radio to contact the others.

In the meantime, the others had tried to call Fitzhugh but found that he must have had his radio turned off up until then. Steve had suggested that they get Mark and Valerie to come and meet them in the city to help get Fitzhugh away from Dr North. The two love birds had been working with a blowtorch back at the Spindrift base camp. Mark and Valerie headed off and soon met the others at the hole in the wall. They all discussed it and decided that Steve and Mark and Barry would go to the park and be ready to help triangulate Fitzhugh's signal if he called in. Dan and Betty and Valerie would wait in the hole in the wall and do their triangulation too.

Steve and Mark and Barry headed for the park on the outskirts of the city near the forest.

It was Dan and the girls who first heard Fitzhugh, once he turned his radio on and called them.

"You have to get out!" said Fitzhugh, "The whole city's going to blow up. There are bombs planted everywhere!"

"Well, little trouble makers again. I wonder what connection you have to our dead citizen," came a voice.

They turned to see that Inspector Kobick had crept into the room to investigate the sound of the shots that had killed the other giant and since been reported to the S.I.D. Now he ran to the door and called his Sergeant into the house.

"Search the place for an axe. This time they've killed a man. We'll break them out of that wall if we have to."

"Oh come on Kobick, how could we lift a gun, let alone fire it?" said Dan.

They gave in to Kobick's threat, came out and were captured and taken to S.I.D. headquarters. This time their radios were confiscated too. They tried to explain what Fitzhugh had recently told them.

"You've never tried this before!" said Kobick, "You'd cause widespread panic just to distract me so you could escape, you little monsters!"

"You've got to take it seriously!" said Dan.

Meanwhile in the park, Steve, Mark and Barry had waited for Fitzhugh to call. When they'd heard him talking to Dan, Mark had begun triangulating. They had overheard the other three being found and caught by Kobick. Then their nerves chilled, as Steve, Mark and Dan heard a bomb go off. Then another, and another. The damage was soon visually apparent to them from the safe vantage point of the park.

The whole city lay in ruins. Steve, Mark and Barry searched the pile of rubble that had once been S.I.D. headquarters, but they saw no sign of the remains of their three dear friends. They returned to the Spindrift base camp and used the ship's more powerful radio to maintain contact with Fitzhugh, who by now was on board a plane, still hidden in Dr North's handbag. Fitzhugh said that they'd never reach him now, and that he didn't want to be rescued anyway. His tiny size had hidden the aged state of his features from the slightly younger giantess. He was happy to stay with her.

On the one hand, Steve, Mark and Barry were experiencing an immeasurable level of grief. On the other hand, they were also free from worrying about the likelihood of giants finding and capturing them. At such a high cost, the city's population had been wiped out, and it would be much harder to find workable materials to repair the space ship, now that the city had been gutted by the explosions. The three earthlings did their best to subsist on forest fruits. With no giants, the outpost was discontinued. All three of them slept by night and searched for food by day.

One day, they were all in the cockpit, testing Mark's latest modifications, which had been made possible by using some giant metal pieces that had been discarded in the forest before the owner had died in the city, and only recently discovered during a food search by the little people.

"It still won't stay in the air long enough to make it worth attempting a lift-off," said Mark, "We lost a hydrogen fuel cell freeing the girls from that tent, and the ship just doesn't have the power. All I've done is repair the damage that the giant cat did to the engines."

"Giant!" said Barry.

"What?" asked Steve, and saw Barry pointing through the cockpit window.

They saw Melany Ackman walking towards the ship. They had once visited her Grandfather's model village and been terrorized by the borderline adolescent girl, when she resented their ability to occupy her grandfather's attention.

Melany walked over and picked up the ship and looked in at them. This time she smiled in a polite friendly manner and walked off with the ship and the three little people inside it. She took it to the model town and set Spindrift down on the lawn outside the town. Some of the garden had been cut back, and they could now see that her grandfather's house was beyond the lawn.

"You can come out, Little People," she said, "I won't hurt you. If you want, I can even take your ship back where I found you, but I mean you no harm."

Steve came out, while Mark and Barry remained in the doorway.

"My grandfather was my only relative. I lived with him until he died in the explosions that destroyed the city," she said.

"I'm sorry," said Steve, "We were on the edge of the city trying to prevent that. But we weren't warned in time, and lost three of our party in the explosions too, and the last one was captured by the giantess who caused it. She took him away in a plane."

This girl had once set fire to a model street with Steve trapped in the middle of the road. He didn't want Mark and Barry coming out yet. Nobody had seen that Steve had hidden a flare gun under his uniform. If the girl tried anything menacing, he would aim for her face. This way, by appearing to be helpless, he gained her trust and would find out if she herself was now trustworthy.

"I'm sorry for all I did to you last time," she said, "I was immature and filled with hate. Now, after what happened to Grandfather, I have come to understand how precious life is."

"You put us through a lot!" said Mark, "You dropped a fire extinguisher which almost flattened our car! Why should we believe you?"

"I don't know," said Melany, "But I will put you back in the forest and leave you alone, if that's what you prefer, or I can take your ship and leave it anywhere you'd like. On the other hand, if you want to move into the model town, I can grow and cook vegetarian food for us all to live on."

"I guess we've all lost a lot, and we're alone in this together now" said Steve.

His old cautious nature had given away to a grim acceptance of the new reality.

"More than ever," said Mark, thinking of Valerie Scott. He had been pondering proposing to her, and whether it would be feasible to marry in a giant land, in the weeks leading up to the bombing.

"Not completely alone," came a vaguely familiar female voice.

Mark saw Marna Whalan step into view from behind Melany.

"Marna!" he said, stepping out of the ship.

"I saw Melany return with your ship. The giants who raised me were killed in the bombing. Melany found my little house and brought it here to be part of her late Grandfather's model town. She's taken care of me ever since."

To Mark and the others, this was not just good news of Marna's survival. It was proof that the giant girl Melany had indeed changed her ways and come to care about the welfare of little people.

The boys moved into the model town. There was nothing more to keep Mark and Marna from becoming involved. Their romance blossomed quickly, with no giant scientists to complicate things this time, and Mark felt the pains of losing Valerie easing over time.

Barry and Melany formed a friendship too. Both were around the same age. On their first meeting, neither had been quite at the stage of adolescence. Now they were both well able to notice each other in a new way. There were no teenage giant boys, nor any teenage earthling girls. It seemed natural that they would get together.

The only man who couldn't find any release for his grief was Steve. He had always been too focussed on leading his party back to earth, to even realise himself at a conscious level, just how much he had come to care for Betty. As well as that, he'd been a pilot for years. He was 33. She was a 24 year old stewardess, who'd barely started on the job a year before the crash into the giant land. He would not have wanted to make her feel romantically pressured by her superior (someone who'd constantly reminded the whole team that he was the group leader) in an alien world where she could not exactly run to Miss Collier or other airline authorities to complain. Now she was dead and gone, along with his best friend Dan. How many times had they all saved each other from the clutches of various giants in that city? Now both giants and earthlings had faced a lot of instant death.

One day in 1985 they were all talking together on the lawn, enjoying a picnic provided by Melany, when they saw a huge coloured whirling warp open just where the forest met the model town. A giant woman came out through the warp and came to rest beside the model town.

She explained that she was Logan St Clair of an earth where all the population are doubles of their 1997 counterparts on normal sized parallel earths.

"Do you mean to say that we've spent two years on a parallel earth?" asked Steve.

Mark, having already understood Logan correctly, smiled, as he waited for her to respond.

"No. This planet is, as you always thought it to be, another world, not a parallel earth. It just so happens that I am from the one earth whose people are size compatible to this world's inhabitants," said Logan, "If you like, I now invite you all to slide through the portal to my complex and show me the schematics of your space ship. I will provide you with help and parts to repair it."

"We'd be grateful," said Steve.

"And if it's not secret, I'd like to learn more about this 'slide' concept," said Mark, ever the engineer.

Logan took them back with her and showed Mark all her schematics. Marna and Melany were as keen as the Spindrift people to live in a populated world, and Logan's people would respect the rights of parallel earthlings, unlike the S.I.D.

As the Spindrift was now considered obsolete in the advent of Sliding technology, Mark used Spindrift parts and equipment to make sliding devices for Steve, Barry & Melany and himself and Marna. Mark and Marna used their sliding device to return to their own earth. At this point, there seemed every reason to still warn people about the space warp, but the Land of the Giants was no longer a threat, unless other warps opened in populated parts of the giants' planet.

Both Barry and Melany had bonded with each other over their common status of orphans, as they'd fallen in love. Logan made another sliding timer, this one giant sized, for Melany to use. Melany continued to live in her house on her own world, but would be regularly visited for dates by Barry, who slid back to his own earth and then used the timer to go on dates with Melany.

They both travelled on dates to Logan's earth, so that they could go out together.

Steve decided to buy some giant flowers on Logan's earth, and hold his own private funeral for Dan and Betty in the church of the model city on the Land of the Giants. He entered a giant flower shop and saw that it was owned and staffed by a giant Betty Hamilton, twelve years older than the one he had lost. So she was three years older than Steve.

This set the former Spindrift captain thinking. He introduced himself to Betty, but did not tell her of her late double during the first several weeks of the dating that ensued between Steve and giant Betty. Finally he had to get the truth off his chest. He confided in her.

She stared in surprise.

"You do realise, that there could be a giant version of me on your world too, even if he's not a pilot," said Steve.

"I don't need to know," said Betty, "I'd rather see more of you."

On the more familiar earth that was his home, Mark Wilson proposed to Marna Whalan.

"I will, Mark," she replied, "Just think. Both our monograms will have the initials M.W. on our towels even now."


End file.
